Hideo Kojima, the veteran Konami designer behind the Metal Gear series, is to be the 2009 recipient of the Game Developers Choice Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. It will be bestowed upon him at this year’s Game Developers Conference taking place in March.{ad}

Meggan Scavio of GDC said:

For years, Hideo Kojima’s contributions to game development have broken new ground and inspired the community to think about creating games in never-before-imagined ways.

The Lifetime Achievement Award puts Kojima in the company of some of videogame’s legendary designers, including Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, role-playing luminary Richard Garriott, Civliization mastermind Sid Meier, The Sims creator Will Wright, and Gunpei Yokoi, Miyamoto’s one-time mentor at Nintendo and creator of the Game Boy.

The Metal Gear saga spans over 20 years, beginning with the original Metal Gear, released in 1987 for the Japanese MSX2 console and later for the NES. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was released in 2008 to rave reviews and purportedly brings the story to a close. Between those two came an additional five games that built upon the Metal Gear universe. The series was thrust into the spotlight with 1998’s Metal Gear Solid, a PlayStation hit that defined Kojima’s style as a convention-bending game designer.

Blake’s Opinion
There may be no better candidate for such a prestigious award than Kojima. Sure, the game press’ honeymoon with Metal Gear Solid 4 may not really be over, but looking at Kojima’s body of work, his use of cinematic techniques, his eagerness to break the fourth wall, and his sense of humor are rarely even imitated and never duplicated.

Most of all, his knack for anticipating his players’ emotions exhibit an old-school style of game design. While studios like Microsoft swear by collecting data from play session after play session, and Valve simply collects feedback from its own developers after playing over and over again, Kojima rules his creations with a sense of auteurism that is rarely found anymore. He manages his players’ psychological states with an artistic flair – not like the aforementioned scientific approach – and it makes his stories and games more impressionable upon us than the latest Halo or Half-Life.

Put bluntly, Kojima may be the closest thing mainstream video gaming has to an avant-garde movement, and to award his unconventional work with such a meaningful award does a lot to validate the artistic potential of all games – even the ones that don’t dare to break the bounds.